Cairo — One protester died and dozens were injured as secular, liberal Egyptians marched again in cities across the country after prayers Friday to denounce the Islamist government of President Mohammed Morsi.

The man was killed when he was struck by two bullets outside the presidential palace in Cairo as rioters pelted elite troops from the Republic Guard guarding the building with Molotov cocktails and stones. Troops replied for the umpteenth time with water cannons, tear gas and warning shots that were fired into the air.

The protests denouncing the rule of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood have become so common that they are not particularly interesting, despite the bloody fireworks. The narrow range of anti-goverment slogans that are chanted have become as familiar today to those who utter them as the lines of a play are to an actor.

The guerrilla street-theatre, for that is what it is, always draws a fleet of orange ambulances and lots of cameras. It starts quietly and builds during the day. The violence that follows is often gratuitous, but it regularly provides dramatic visuals for Arab and Western news networks, whose narrow focus on the street often make them appear to be far more important than they are.

But the demonstrations, which are organized by opposition factions who don’t like each other much, have hardly galvanized the nation. Nor have they acted as a catalyst for change since the dramatic initial protests succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship.

This is not to denigrate the protesters. Most of them are sincere in their desire for Egypt to have something that looks and feels a lot more like a Western-style democracy. Their bravery has been proven by the fact that scores of young men have been killed and many more injured in street fights with government supporters or security forces over the past few months.

Still, by the most charitable estimates, less than one per cent of the population of Cairo has turned out at any one time for the many rallies opposing Morsi. This Friday evening only a few thousand Cairenes marched to the presidential palace although it was hard not to think that far more people were involved from the grainy night images broadcast over and over again by the BBC and others.

Despite the almost daily protests against Morsi’s regime, these events have not caused him to change his policies a bit. Nor are they likely to.

However, there is an outside party that may have more success at making Morsi grant concessions.

The International Monetary Fund has been pressing Morsi to show that he has a firm grip on power, is slashing spending and is willing to be more inclusive of minorities and women or his government will lose nearly $5 billion in urgently needed loans that are currently in limbo. Without that money to keep Egypt’s economy sputtering, it is difficult to see how the president will be able to go ahead with parliamentary elections tentatively re-scheduled for April.

Morsi has so far been able to dodge or ignore his political rivals, but the IMF poses a much bigger challenge. To achieve the stability that they have demanded, he has to demonstrate that he can peacefully quell the protests. There is a real trick to doing this that has so far alluded him. The main reason he has been unable to do this yet is largely because the security forces, who were the Brotherhood’s implacable foes for half a century, are not much interested in helping him or his party although it must be said that they are have until now been equally uninterested in helping his rivals.

The upshot of all this is that while Egyptians latest attempts at revolution do not amount to nearly as much as it sometimes seems when viewed through a tear gas filled night-vision television camera’s lens, the Islamist government and its secular opponents stumble along in lock step with no end to the country’s misery in sight.

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